


Come, Josephine

by Yeah_JSmith



Series: The Art of Moving Forward [1]
Category: Titanic (1997)
Genre: AFAB Jack Dawson, Bisexual Rose DeWitt Bukater, F/F, F/M, Gen, Moving On, Nonbinary Character, Nonbinary Jack Dawson, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, References to Depression, Survivor Guilt, The life and death of Rose Calvert, cross-dressing, happiness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-05
Updated: 2018-06-05
Packaged: 2019-05-18 13:00:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14853242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yeah_JSmith/pseuds/Yeah_JSmith
Summary: The first few years are hard. She wakes up with a scream in her throat, visions of stars and bodies up in front of her eyes, suffocating in icy water pulling her down, down, down. She can't help but wish for the life she could have had with the one who extracted so precious a promise.But it gets better. Life moves on, and so does she. She leaves the RMS Titanic behind, even if the ship of dreams never quite leaves her.





	Come, Josephine

**Author's Note:**

> This started with a comment: "You have Jack Dawson hair." Yes, yes I do. It's my go-to. Paradoxically to everyone who knows me personally, _Titanic_ is dear to my heart, so although this fandom barely exists and nobody cares about reading this, I'm putting it up. Stupid rambling explanation at the bottom if anyone is actually reading and happens to be interested. Possible gender-swap(ish)? Depends on how you read canon I guess. Oh, and references to an afterlife. I don't believe in life after death, but canon infers one, so...

Ellis Island marks a change in Rose, and not only her name. The frightened and desperate girl dangling off the back of a ship already plunged into the sea and died there, and in her place stands a woman who has loved, lost, and come out of it all with no fear. Rose DeWitt Bukater would have died a quiet death, destitute though she’d want for nothing. Rose Dawson lacks everything, but she has a future. Losing everything has afforded her a fresh start.

* * *

_lungs burning muscles contracting where is the hand she promised to hold where is the sky she’s drowning_

_sea of the dead light sweeping over them_

_a beautiful corpse sinking beneath the waves_

_can’t breathe can’t breathe can’t breathe can’t breathe_

She wakes up gasping and clawing at her throat, choked by the sea. It’s been three weeks since she landed, and she hasn’t stopped trembling. Shock, they’re calling it. Rose knows better, though. It isn’t shock, it’s anger. Anger at everyone who made the horrible mistakes that sank the ship. Anger at herself for not engaging enough in the cold water, for not stealing enough kisses to warm them both a fraction (it might have done nothing, but it would have been _something)._ Anger at Jack, too, for clinging to that masculine persona at the expense of their future together. She _knows_ why. He was a man most of the time, and too many people knew him as _he_ that nobody would have believed Rose. It’s funny; all he would’ve had to do was pull on a woman’s dressing gown and a hat from any abandoned luggage case, a thirty-second job if that, and they’d have begged him to escape with her. No second thought to the fact that he preferred his chosen name to his given name, even when he became she and touched Rose in a way no man could understand. Even Cal wouldn’t have recognized Jacqueline.

She can’t stop thinking about Jack Dawson, even though she let him go to the bottom of the sea.

After her short stay at the hotel, she’s been taken in by a matronly widow whose children are grown and whose husband is dead, and perhaps it’s fraudulent but Rose has bonded with Gerta over it, though she can’t bring herself to say his name. She _would_ have married Jack, in any case; with no papers and no records, Jack could easily have been her husband. They could have sold the Heart of the Ocean and started something new. She hasn’t shown Gerta the necklace. She’ll never show anyone. Cal doesn’t deserve to find it and now it’s the only reminder of what she found on a pretty ship full of such useless baubles. Full of people who valued style over safety. People who let other people die because money made them better.

 _(That_ is where the anger really comes from. She used to be one of them.)

Rose Dawson is not Rose DeWitt Bukater. Rose Dawson is the wife of an artist who died trying to bring her home, and she has no fear. So she trembles as she packs her things and leaves another note, a much kinder one this time, thanking Gerta for her grace. She takes a knife and cuts off her hair, dons a pair of Gerta’s son’s trousers, and heads into the early dawn. There’s got to be some work that needs doing, and Ross Dawson, husband to Mrs. “My Wife” Dawson who perished at sea, might as well be the one to do it.

* * *

The second night she sleeps in a barn, she has her nightmares on a hay bale. Her mind was almost kind this time, beginning with the tryst in the car, Rose’s hands trailing down the hard surface of Jack’s chest and into the untamed hair above that plump little nub that made Jack gasp and writhe above her, knees carefully wide so Rose’s fingers could move freely. Jack’s lips across her breast, Jack’s tongue sending darts through Rose’s body, Jack’s callused, practiced, pretty hands working her body to the end. But then the water came and ripped them apart, naked and cold. Somehow her mother was there too, managing to scold Rose underwater while Cal’s pet cop held her in place.

She wakes up gasping for air, and calms herself by tugging at the ripped skin on her palms. The axe on the farm is nothing like the axe on the ship, and she thinks this skin problem is going to get worse before it gets better, but at least it’s work. Chopping wood and feeding animals and running errands for the mistress is mindless and exhausting. Maybe soon the nightmares will go away.

* * *

The first time she makes love to a woman, it’s not love. Rose pays her for the honor, but turns inward, shy, when Rebecca (blonde, of course, with sea-green eyes) asks her to take off her clothes.

“I…” She is Rose Dawson, and she should fear nothing. So she continues, “You might not like what you see.”

And then she pulls off her loose shirt, exposing the bandages that allow her to work so efficiently. The prostitute’s mouth opens in a sort of “a-ha” expression and she holds out her hand, inviting. “It’s all the same to me, dear. You’re not the first.”

“I’d like to please you,” Rose tells her with a small smile, unrolling her bandages.

“That _is_ a first,” Rebecca says with a snort. She drops her robe. Her breasts are large and her pubic hair is trimmed neatly, but this is good anyway. This is what Rose wants, what she _needs._ “Is that really what you paid me for?”

“A mutually pleasurable experience. A chance to please a woman the way I-”

Stop. It’s been a year since she landed, and it’s still as painful as it was to remember.

“It’s hard out there,” Rebecca says softly. “In here, it can all disappear. Let me make it disappear, darling.”

So she does, not bothering to correct the assumption. Rebecca’s fingers are petal-soft and smooth, and she brings Rose to climax with her mouth and then again with her hands before she allows Rose to reciprocate. Rebecca is beautiful with her head thrown back as Rose clumsily copies what she felt just now, what she _remembers,_ but there’s no real afterglow this time, no soft cheek on Rose’s breast, just a strict, practiced cleanup and a sympathetic smile. Rose is no artist; she could never capture this moment, the moment she’s required to _get out,_ but she stores it in her memory because it’s beautiful. Rebecca is a woman who knows what she wants.

It’s not the same. That’s all right.

* * *

She moves on when the mistress dies. Her hands are rough and callused, her muscles toned and distinctly un-feminine, her pockets lined with plenty of extra coin. She still has nightmares, but they’re manageable; she drowns every night, but every morning she spends less and less time trying not to scream. She knows how to ice fish now, and how to ride a horse properly, and nobody tells her to switch to side-saddle because nobody knows she’s a woman, apart from Rebecca whose discretion is appreciated. There is a kind of freedom in being a man, one she both appreciates and resents. Given the choice, she would rather be a woman with the opportunities of men, but for now her little secret must remain such.

“I truly can’t tell sometimes,” says Rebecca from the bed as Rose finishes pulling on her shirt. Their last tryst. “You could be a fine actress.”

“There’s money in that,” Rose replies thoughtfully. She understands the value of that now, has learned to value pragmatism over aesthetics. Life, not Jack, has taught her that. Zest for life and a willingness to work hard – that’s what she inherited from the sinking ship, from the love she never got a chance to grow.

 _I’ll never let go,_ she thinks, and it’s not bad. It’s been five and a half years since she landed. Her promise, to never let go of _living,_ sings her to sleep at night. It was love. It was tragedy. That’s all right.

* * *

It took more money than she expected to head all the way west to California, and although she could drop the act and work as a seamstress or a waitress, she chooses to take advantage of the opportunities manual labor and careful dressing have given her. Perhaps, she thinks, she might stop having nightmares of drowning if she sails again, so she signs up to work on a fishing boat. It’s got a dedicated route that doesn’t take her far from land, it’s much smaller than the Carpathia, and the men drink good dark ale, just like she likes.

It’s hard work, but it’s good work; the nightmares don’t go _away,_ exactly, but she’s usually so tired that her body can’t react. Her dreams soften until she dreams of living as often as she dreams of dying. When the boat goes up in flames in 1918 because some drunken idiot thought it would be fun to burn something down, she could move on with Willie and Jim from her crew, but she thinks about Rebecca’s advice – thinks about how there’s money in it – and decides to try her hand in that industry instead.

After all, she’s always been interested.

* * *

The first time she makes love to a man is awkward, and it’s not love either. She compares him to Rebecca; hard where she was soft, forceful where she was relaxed. Tense and annoyed on her stomach, Rose doesn’t think about Jack for more than an instant. She doesn’t climax, either, and she knows from Rebecca’s teachings that it shouldn’t have hurt like that, even the first time. Timothy is a careless and selfish lover, and she suspects he’s disappointed that she turned out to be female.

They’re working on a set together, moving and building pieces and props. She likes to think he considers her a friend, and she’s right; they don’t sleep together again, but they do move in together, just two men sharing space to save money. This time, it’s Rose who remains discreet as he sneaks in male lovers. They keep each other’s secrets and share private jokes on set, until one day someone catches Rose – who has carelessly neglected to keep her hair short, thinking her hat would be enough to hide it – in the middle of a joyful pantomime and realizes Ross Dawson may not be so male after all.

Fortunately, it isn’t much of a scandal, once she admits she lost everything to the greedy depths of the North Atlantic a couple of years prior and she’s just trying to survive. The casting director who caught her pantomime offers her a small, silly role; she’s only in the first part, and later she won’t remember the name of the film. She has talent, and if she lets her figure soften, she could be great, they say. There’s money in acting. She parts ways amicably with Timothy and can’t quite manage to soften her figure enough to be ideal, but the cut of a dress can work wonders and the camera adds ten pounds anyway.

It’s been seven years since she landed and the charade is up. She thinks about Jack in relation to herself, the freedoms afforded to men. She thinks about their private, secret conversation about hope and love, wherein Jack confessed that he was only a man when it suited him (which was often enough to call himself one), that a poor man would never suffer the indignities of a poor woman. Or even a rich one. She didn’t understand then. She does now.

Acting is freedom too, though. Her upcoming roles are strict and a little shallow, but there’s money in it. She rides horses every so often. She stores money in her mattress. She sews pockets into the lining of every piece of clothing she owns, and never leaves the Heart of the Ocean behind.

* * *

It’s eight years since she landed and Rose might become a star if she keeps doing so well, but the joys in life have come at the expense of her memories. In her dreams, nightmares or not, Jack is as vibrant as the brightest California sunset, but when she awakes…

She can’t quite remember his face. The eyes never change, but were his cheekbones as high as Rebecca’s? Were his lips as narrow as Timothy’s? Was his hair longer or shorter than Rose’s when she was posing as a man? His hands, she remembers, were perfect, rough artist’s hands, and his drawings exquisite, but was that darling little mark on his left hand, or his right? Did he have freckles, or was that the pretty actress she admired from afar building her first set? Was his voice as deep as she remembers, or is she mistaking it for Cal’s?

It’s eight years and she knows. It was love, and it was tragedy, but she was as much in love with the temptation of freedom as she was with the man who was a woman who was a man, and she’s not too prideful to admit that she was also irresistibly drawn to the taboo. Jack _was_ freedom, but if he’d lived, it might not have lasted. She misses him just as fiercely as ever, but it’s a quiet pain now. As Shakespeare joked in his famous (and alarmingly resonant) satire, a sweet sorrow.

When she’s in bed with Emily, it’s the two of them, without any ghosts. Emily serves an upper-class family and she’s just as busy as Rose is during the day, what with her career, but at night they’re free to be whatever they want to be. Rose tucks her long red curls under a hat and wears her old working clothes to meet her lover, and Emily is always giddy to see her like that. Sometimes when she’s alone, Rose has the strange thought that she has in some ways become the man she loves (loved?), but when they’re together she thinks about the little gifts that have slowly been collecting in Emily’s small wardrobe, the sparkle in Emily’s eyes, the way she pulls at the sheets.

In another life, perhaps, they could go public, shout their love from the rooftops. But in this life, Emily would lose her job and Rose would be quietly but firmly disgraced. She wants to spare Emily the pain of homelessness, of poverty, of sleeping on slats and wondering what comes next.

(That’s where Jack and Rose differed the most, she thinks. He professed to love the freedom of it, but as thrilling as anticipation can be, she prefers to know she’ll be eating food instead of sleep for dinner.)

She could love Emily for the rest of her life. Her heart has enough room for both.

* * *

Nine years after she landed, Rose goes east for an ill-advised modeling project and worries that someone might recognize her, but no one does. Who might connect Rose Dawson, the budding actress, to Rose DeWitt Bukater, dead housepoor society girl? When she comes back to California, Emily is gone. Her former employers, according to the new girl, dismissed her for sexual perversion. (In a whisper, with a giggle, the girl says Emily touched women where only a man should touch. How scandalous.) Rose isn’t poor anymore, but she doesn’t have unlimited resources; she can’t find her lover, and she doesn’t have time to mourn. She only just lost out to Alice Joyce in a film she had her eye on, so she needs to diversify her skill-set. Dance more, smoke more, feel more.

Films are difficult. Trying to convey emotion and meaning without words isn’t as easy as it sounds to outsiders, especially for a woman who – nine years ago – almost threw herself off the stern of the largest ship in history. She remembers that night often, and not just because it was the first time she met Jack. All things considered, he wasn’t very pleasant to her that first day, alternately pushy and condescending, but that misbehavior gave her _drive._ Not just to live, but to live a life worth living, free of outside control.

He’d been pushy, he told her on their walk to her suite before he drew her, because he recognized in her the things about himself he’d had to deal with on his own, and didn’t want to see her drown in her own head. She confessed that when she’d looked down on him from the railing, she had _seen_ him, had seen _her,_ had seen the ease with which the woman turned into the man. When she’d looked at his drawings, she’d known how he felt about women. The secret desires Rose had never allowed herself to think on, let alone act on.

Jack’s youthful sweetness, the implication that he _would_ back off if she really wanted it, made him infinitely more interesting than (and preferable to) Cal. But she didn’t know him then. She understands him now, but they knew each other for a mere two days, and she’ll never know him the way she knew Emily who was her steadfast lover, Timothy who was her steadfast friend, and Rebecca who was something in between.

Jack saved her from an icy grave, but he didn’t save her soul. It doesn’t work like that. He staved off the melancholy and ensured that she had something to live for; the melancholia still comes back without warning, a different sort of drowning, a loss of self. In these days or weeks she encounters an overwhelming urge to cut off her hair again and move somewhere quiet, where no one will question Ross Dawson, but she’s old enough now to understand that it would only be another instance of running from her problems. A different ship to jump from. Running won’t solve the problem any more than suicide would, so she perseveres.

Emily is gone, but Rose is not. And if perhaps she is more ambitious, more _reckless_ in her pursuit of life and career, that’s all right. What her short time aboard a doomed ship taught her was that running is all right when you’re running _toward_ something.

* * *

It’s been ten years since she landed, and Rose is in a flying machine. It’s beautiful from up here and she finds herself singing under her breath. _Up she goes, up she goes._ She hasn’t felt such a thrill since she fell out of a “window” on a faulty set and landed in a surprised actor’s arms, giggling with delight. It’s hard to fear things as small as that after surviving the sinking of the Titanic. Even flying doesn’t compare. Nothing does.

The nightmares aren’t gone. Rose suspects they never will be. On the days that she has waking nightmares, she cancels her appointments, or if she can’t, she smiles and smiles until a smile is all she is. If that doesn’t work, she pretends that she’s a man pretending to be a woman, which usually does the trick. Waking nightmares aren’t omnipresent, especially when she’s so disconnected from her own identity. Rose isn’t Rose, she’s Ross _playing_ Rose. She has no idea whether or not that’s healthy, but she can’t confess those nightmares. She can hardly breathe thinking about them, holding her breath until she’s dizzy and again a little longer. She drowns and drowns and drowns and drowns, but…

Up in the sky, it’s _freedom._ Up in the sky, drowning is impossible. She has air in her lungs and stars in her eyes, and it’s beautiful.

Touching down is a disappointment, but it doesn’t wipe the smile from her face. She laughs at her slightly shaky legs as the pilot helps her down and she tells him, “I want to fly one of these.”

“I just took you up,” he replies, looking cute with his goggles on his forehead.

“No, I want to _fly_ it.”

“Well, you can’t,” the pilot says, “not without a pilot’s license.”

“Then I’ll get one.”

“Just like that? It takes training, dedication, time…”

“I didn’t make it onto a lifeboat when my ship went down several years ago,” she says with the wink that makes Hollywood men puff up like peacocks. She doesn’t make a habit of telling this story to intimate friends, let alone strangers, but this is important. So long as she doesn’t mention the name of the ship, no one has any reason to make connections. “Another passenger almost drowned me trying to use me as a buoy after we lucky ones resurfaced. I almost froze to death waiting for someone, _anyone,_ to come back. If there’s one thing that taught me, it’s that every moment in life is precious. I want to fly. I _will_ fly. And God help anyone who tries to stand in my way.”

Because she is Rose Dawson, and she fears nothing. Up she goes, up she goes.

* * *

It’s fifteen years since she landed and Rose has her pilot’s license. Money wasn’t an issue, but _time_ was. Work has been steady and demanding, as have remedial dance lessons and creating art. Rose can’t draw for the life of her, but she’s found a nascent talent for sculpture and pottery, courtesy of three Bohemian friends in Berkeley who surprisingly don’t care that sometimes she wears old trousers and eschews decoration. Her friends always have alcohol, which she sorely misses, and cigarettes, which she likes to indulge in.

Working a pottery wheel has worked different muscles than chopping wood or building set pieces, but she likes the effort it takes, the honest joy of mistakes and triumphs alike. Patrick and Patrice, two siblings from the Berkeley area, like to come and watch Rose and her friends in the workshop; Patrick draws movement, and Patrice has her eye on a neighbor boy, but they’re friends, in a way. None of them have made the connection between Rosie the clay artist and Rose Dawson the actress, and she’s grateful to keep it that way. People have a tendency to treat her differently when they find out that she has money, that she’s a _star._

She takes Patrick up into the sky and later, takes him to bed. He’s sweet, inexperienced. He reminds her of herself, all those years ago, trying not to be clumsy and trying to satisfy. They use their hands and mouths; despite being 32, Rose has no interest in having children yet, and it just...feels _right._ His wide gray eyes shine in the dim light and his ginger hair is thick and long enough that she can run her hands through it, like that servant boy from her youth in Philadelphia whose hair is the only thing about him she can remember. His vaguely Southern accent reminds her of Molly. Mostly, though, he reminds her of himself, a sweet man who appreciates beauty and likes to please the people he cares about. Their affair lasts exactly two weeks, at which point he finds out who she is and gets skittish.

It’s all right. There are more roles to take, more things to learn, more sights to see. She won’t waste time mourning, but instead, she’ll cherish the time they _did_ have together.

* * *

She meets Alex Calvert quite by accident. She’s on the Santa Monica pier on a beautiful June afternoon, gazing out at the Pacific and wondering how things might have gone differently had they set out from the Philippine Islands instead of Southampton. Time alone is a luxury; Rose Dawson is a sought-after name in the talkies, and she has more money than she knows what to do with, more money than she ever had as a “first-class girl.” She has little patience for high society anymore, would rather meet up with Patrice for a cheap outing or take pretty girls up in her plane for a small fee, so she doesn’t have anything to spend the money _on._ Perhaps a child…? She _is_ 34, but no one seems right for the job of husband and father.

She’s deep in one of her bouts of melancholia, unable to quite take pleasure in anything specifically, when she smells tobacco. She still smokes sometimes, but there’s little time for _enjoying_ it, and since there’s no mother to annoy, it isn’t much of a help in one of her slumps.

But she still likes the smell, so she turns to find the source, and stops dead.

It can’t be. That hair, blond and longish, chopped a bit unevenly at the nape of a slender neck. That nose, a straight shot from forehead to tip. That soft, angular face. Those graceful hands, working a pencil over a folio of papers. It _can’t_ be, because Jack is dead. Is she dreaming? Hallucinating? Her feet move on their own, carrying her closer and closer, and her hand reaches out –

“Oh, hello, there,” says the figure on the bench, and looks up at her with startled brown eyes. His voice is rough and his lips are pale and chewed raw. Of course it wasn’t Jack, how could it be? This is unsettling, but manageable, just like everything else. He shifts, uncomfortable, as she stares. “Can I help you?”

“Ah...sorry, I thought you were someone else,” she replies stupidly.

“Ooh, I finally get to say I have _one of those faces,”_ he says with a silly grin. She looks down at his papers; only words, no sketches. “Sorry I’m not who you thought I was. Alexander Calvert, at your service, Miss…?”

“Dawson,” she says. “Rose Dawson.”

He blinks. “Like the actress?”

“Not _like_ the actress. I am the actress.”

“Wow! I saw you in _Purple Parlor_ and _Smile Baby!_ That...wow, that’s neat.”

He’s adorable, and she wants to keep him immediately, but she’s had enough of making silly decisions about that sort of thing. She can’t imagine he’s older than 25 anyway. How _scandalous._ Not that she’s shied too heavily away from scandal before, but she was still a child at that age.

“What are you working on,” she asks, instead of walking away like she should.

“Oh...just a story. A book, maybe. I’m a writer, or at least, I try to be. Haven’t had much luck so far, just a few articles in a rag or two.”

“Well,” she continues, leaning down to put her face next to his, like the masochistic idiot she always has been, “I haven’t been reading the words, but you have awfully pretty penmanship.”

“That’s kind of you, Miss Dawson.”

“Rose,” she corrects.

“...Rose,” he echoes, obviously confused at the way a famous actress is getting friendly with him.

October of that year, the stock market crashes, and she holds his head in her lap when his brother, an investor, mysteriously falls out of a train – obviously not suicide, says everyone who knew him (and has a vested interest in preserving his name), but Rose and Alex know better. She thinks about telling him of the time she almost threw herself off the stern of a very large ship, but the story that comes after is too intimate to share, even with someone she’s fond of.

(And when he kisses her six months later, she knows she can’t _ever_ tell him; she loves him for who he is, but he might get the impression that she loves him for who she _thought_ he was that day on the pier.)

* * *

In the spring of 1931, Rose delivers her first child in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. They name her Margaret. That fall, she begins her university studies; she’s the oldest one there, but she has a young face and a young husband. No one knows that she has a child, only that she used to live in California and makes money flying rich people around for an hour at a time. There are rumors about the Calverts: that Mr. Calvert is secretly wealthy, that Mrs. Calvert used to be a prostitute, that sort of thing. It doesn’t bother them. Alex stays home with Margaret, working on his book, and he’s happy to do it.

They celebrate with cheap dark ale _(finally!)_ when he publishes his first novel in 1934, and although they’ve been careful to use condoms, she still has to hide her second pregnancy for a semester and a half lest she get kicked out. It’s easy enough to wear loose-fitting clothes and act as though nothing is wrong. This one, they name Oliver, after Alex’s father.

Their third child, they plan once she graduates, and she has Thomas in 1936 at the ripe old age of 41. Alex, who is only 35 (he’s older than she suspected when they met, but only just), is happy enough to keep the standard, boring sex to a minimum, and instead experiment with their hands and mouths when the children are asleep. As evidenced by Oliver, condoms aren’t perfect, and three children is already risky in the midst of a depression, no matter how much Rose saved and no matter how handy the whole family is with a fishing rod.

She reads (and cries at) Djuna Barnes’ _Nightwood_ the year it comes out and falls in love with the writing of Gertrude Stein, which Alex finds both charming and amusing, and as their children grow, she thinks _this is what love is._ Alex helps her through her bouts of melancholia and holds her through her nightmares, never asking why she sometimes wakes up choking. She smiles when she looks at her children, all three of them, even in the hardest of times. She has kept her promise. But good times don’t always last, and Alex dies in 1955, just three days after their first grandchild is born.

 _I will never let go,_ she promises again, not just to Jack, but to Alex, to Emily, to everyone she’s loved and lost in her life.

* * *

Brock Lovett reminds her a bit of her old crewmate Willie, which is the reason she decides to sit and tell her story after she sees her portrait. She had no particular attachment to Willie, beyond the requisite camaraderie of fishermen who spend the majority of their time on a boat together, but she’s grown soft in her old age. Sentimental. Besides, he’s a treasure hunter; he’s not going to find what he wants, but she can spare a treasured story for a man who will soon be heartbroken.

Lizzie, her granddaughter, has a girlfriend, though she calls Daria a “best friend” and pretends she isn’t giving the woman moon eyes the way Rose pretends she doesn’t see it. She’s not worried about a reaction from her family, but perhaps telling Jack’s story might help explain why Rose keeps inviting Daria to dinner.

(The poor dears keep misinterpreting the word “girlfriend” as grandma-slang.)

In her story, she calls Jack a man, because he was one, but she takes care to describe his femininity, and the crew of the Keldysh know the truth of things by the time Rose DeWitt Bukater looks over Jack Dawson’s drawings on the deck of the Titanic. She does not lie when she describes their sexual encounter in the car, and she does not omit the part where, between kisses, Jack asked Rose to call him Jacqueline. _(Just for now. Just for this.)_ This story, she hopes they realize, is better treasure than a diamond could ever be.

She could give the necklace to Mr. Lovett, but then she would have to explain why she kept it hidden. She’s not sure she _can_ explain that one, nor can she explain why it finally feels okay to return it to the sea after 84 years.

“Grandma,” Lizzie says later, as she guides Rose back into bed, “how come you never told anyone?”

“Because Rose DeWitt Bukater died with the love of her life when the Titanic sank,” Rose replies, patting her granddaughter’s hand. “My life began when hers ended.”

* * *

She’s in the middle of kissing him when she realizes this is not a dream. There is an element of reality here, a firmness that dreams never have. She can feel the fabric on her skin, can smell the ocean and that slight charcoal-and-tobacco scent she forgot Jack always had on him. The kiss is better than all the kisses she’s dreamed up thus far.

“I must be dead,” she concludes quietly. Jack offers her his arm and leads her up the stairs, out to the deck. She lets him guide her, because it’s been a long time since they ran hand in hand up and down this unnecessarily grand ship. “Why am I here? Why are _you_ here?”

“I don’t know why you’re here, but I’m here because I want to be. Folks move on sometimes, and then I can only see them in mirrors. I think it has to do with what you want. As for me, do you not want me to be here,” he asks carefully. His face is earnest and _so young._ She feels young, too. If she looked in the mirror, she knows she’d see herself as she was 84 years ago.

With a rush of shame, she admits, “I want it more than anything. I was just expecting...nothing. Or Alex, at least.”

“Your husband?”

“And the father of my children.”

He grins. “I told you that you’d have babies.”

“A free woman in a world without reliable birth control?” She laughs, elbowing him in the side. “It was a foregone conclusion.”

“Maybe so, Rose. _Rose._ I’ve missed having your name in my mouth, Rose.”

“I’ve missed it too, Jack. I assume you haven’t been watching me?”

Jack shakes his head and leans against the railing, forearms perched there as he stares at the dark water. She joins him, and he puts his arm around her. “Not really. I don’t know how it works. Sometimes I get flashes, and I know what birth control is for some reason, and I know you died on a different boat. I feel like I’ve lived a thousand lives I can’t remember very well; I know stuff I shouldn’t and I don’t know how or why. But mostly, I’ve been waiting for you.”

“For 84 years?”

“Is that how long it’s been? Wow. I’m really good at predicting the future, aren’t I?”

She wonders if Alex is on this ship. If Emily is. If she’ll see Rebecca or Patrick. She hopes she doesn’t see Cal or Ruth. But she fits into Jack’s side like they were made for each other, and the water is beautiful, and so is Jack. If this is a good afterlife, she might have time to find her loved ones, or she might be with Jack forever; they might live a life together and then die together, old and well-loved, once this afterlife boat docks. If this is a bad afterlife, the ship is sure to sink over and over again, drowning them both. It doesn’t matter; either way, this is her chance to savor a few more experiences with the first person she ever loved.

She makes the choice to allow herself to love him. And suddenly...

She is 17 again, and she knows she’s dead, but she’s either lacking in crucial memories or she never had them, and the impressions of a long, full life are from whatever brought her here. Margaret. Oliver. Thomas. Lizzie. Emily. Alex. She knows their names and faces, knows who they were to her and how they might react if she interacted with them, but does she really know them? Or was it all a dream?

(Does it matter? She knows what she knows, and her sweet Jack is here beside her, even though she knows for a fact that he died at her side. Died so that she could live.)

She steps back, away from the railing, and reaches out. “Take my hand, Jack. And then take me to bed.”

“Right now,” he asks, voice rough with feeling. Her heart swells with affection.

“Right now,” she affirms. He takes her hand and she pulls him closer. “I haven’t seen you since I was 17, and here I am again. I think I kept looking for you, and I think I found glimpses of you in everyone I ever fell in love with, but I never found _you._ Now I have you, and I want us to make the most of it.”

“Well, then, we’d better go _find_ a bed,” he says playfully into her ear, sending a chill down her neck.

They do. Jacqueline loves her, and Jack loves her, and Rose does not intend to waste a single precious moment.

**Author's Note:**

> It's been 21 years, and I can still smell the popcorn and sweat. (Sorry, I had to.)
> 
>  _Titanic_ was incredibly problematic and (looking back) not very historically accurate, but it was the first time I felt like a real person instead of a mistake. I sneaked in with a group of older teens and managed to see my very first movie on the big screen. I maybe should have picked something other than _Titanic,_ but the redhead was pretty and it had a boat in it. I was young, so I saw what I wanted to see, and I totally saw Jack as a masculine woman who mostly lived as a man, probably because I identified with the character. I didn't know what genderfluidity was. I'm not sure if there was a name for it back then, even though it's existed forever. There certainly wasn't one in Nowhere, Georgia. All I knew was that I was poor as shit, excluded, restless, able to pass for a boy or a girl due to short hair, loose second- or third-hand clothes, and internalized misogyny (i.e., "boys can do more, everybody says so"). Being NB is weird when you're a kid and your parents are raging homophobes, so, you know. 
> 
> Anyway I saw the movie and didn't understand how two people could connect so fast and deeply. I still don't. Their romance mirrored the ship: fast, fleeting, doomed. At 11, I was more concerned by the horrific treatment of the lower-class and of Rose by her fiancé. And then at the end I hated Old Lady Rose for throwing all that money into the sea, because I lived in a trailer and eff rich people. I still have feelings about Young Rose, who is a total rockstar. Zero people will read this, probably, but if you are a person reading this and liked it...hi. I'm working on the sequel nobody really wants.


End file.
